TheDutyLife -2- How to Protect Yourself Against Social Proof

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Have you ever be in your way to a live event CONCERT you like. At an intersection, you encounter a group of people, all staring at the sky. Without a blink an eye and even thinking about it, you immediately peer upwards too. Why is that? Social proof at work.

Or in the middle of the live event CONCERT –THE TENOR is displaying mastery, a masterpiece, someone begins to clap his hands and all of sudden the whole stadium joins in.You do too.Why?Social proof

Or in the advertisement industry which benefits greatly from our weakness of social proof- in unclear situation where they are wide range of a given products/services with no obvious advantage and disadvantage and where people like you and me appear.

Social proof is our strong propensity or our human tendency instinct to imitate each other, because the mass give us sometimes the illusion of behaving in a correct way. In another word the more people display a certain behaviour or follow a certain idea, the more appropriate the behaviour or the truer the idea –which of course is mostly absurd.

So how do you go about protecting yourself from social proof?

I have two big ideas.

First and foremost –Have a semi- sceptical approach of making decision in the given case, by looking for negative instances which will prove the initial (proposition/conjecture) wrong. And when you don’t find certainty of wrongness then you can give yourself a go.

-Second stay on track by reminding yourself that disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation- since is our body of knowledge do not grow by series verification facts but by negative instances we get closer to the truth. Yes

By having a semi-sceptical approach and knowingly that is more rigorous that confirmation- you avoid being at the mercy of your own gullibility and sucker proneness for recipes stemming from our love for positive advice and only positive advice (which by the way doesn’t give you the full picture).Just take a look at this Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of

all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

Furthermore here is what the legendary Charlie Mungerbusiness partner of Warren Buffett said “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent”

Yes in practice it is the negative that is used by the pros, the magnificent.

All what I am saying is we should be careful on things on which we can make inference and on things on which we can’t, we should know our limits, we should know where we can do better than other places, we should be more empirical (meaning verifiable experience) and remember what Mark twain said” Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority- it is time to pause and reflect”

So by putting into practice the two big ideas above- we start to develop a sound judgement, wisdom, magnanimity, beauty

-This is one of the way to experience the duty life. By the way the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty.

Thank you very much for reading this blog post

https://www.optionalityprofits.com/blog